Despite four years since the global crash and 9+ since Linkedin was born, many executives and professionals haven't grasped the full impact of a reset economy and the Internet on a job hunt.

Here are some the most common ill conceived notions that I hear:

1. Being on Linkedin will bring job opportunities to you.
There is a common belief that if you build your profile, then the recruiters will flock to you. Well, most likely, your Linkedin profile will give you a boost on Google ranking in a name search.

Solution: The big value of Linkedin is the access you get to networking in 50 groups and 50 subgroups. Rather than waiting to be found, build your Linkedin connections into thousands for ongoing leverage. 

2. I customize my resume for every position and opening.
Good luck with this one because they will all have to synch your one Linkedin profile. For that matter, all your profiles on Viadeo, Xing, Linkedin, Orkut, etc should all deliver the same message about you.

Solution: Focus your search target on one or two overlapping business domains. Gear all your branding and positioning of yourself around those sectors.

3. The search firms don't get back to me or they have nothing for me.
Search firms more than ever are working to find the perfect fit for their client companies. Given that their business is down by more than half since the crash, the demand of top talent continues to exceed supply. Unless you exactly fit their requirements, you will find no opportunities forthcoming from them.

Solution: Using search consultants and headhunters as a source of information about market trends and companies hiring would provide more fruitful results.

4. My continued outreach to my network is wearing out my welcome with them.
Don't use up your direct network by continuous asking for introductions to job openings. When those turn up empty, or as dead ends... and they mostly do... then your network is exhausted.

Solution: Double or triple your network by using your existing connections for introductions into their network. This grows a relevant source of contacts in your field without much effort.

5. My employer will suspect that I am looking if I am highly visible on the Internet.
I am still surprised by how much that concerns people when millions are on social networks now. Just do an advanced people search on Linkedin by your company and competitors. You will find more than you expect.

Solution: Get on the Internet with gusto because you only have to do it once. Put up profiles. Build a website and blog. Become visibly well branded and be done with it. Once you are on it, that becomes old news. 

6. Since I am not willing to relocate, I am looking only at local employers.
The market place for talent is now global and your competition can come from anywhere thanks in part to the Internet and to the willingness of professionals outside the USA to seek opportunities anywhere.

Solution: Search globally and work locally. You cannot determine who or where your next employer will be. You can negotiate the details like location when they make an offer.

7. I don't need to be visible online as my job is secure and I am happy in my current situation.
Nowadays all marketing is online. Look at every Superbowl ad for its references to product websites. Professional advancement, and career promotion are done equally outside your organization as within.

Solution: The professional status you build for yourself outside your company reflects positively on you and your organization. Making a name for yourself is most easily done online.

The Labor Market Bites Chinese Factories As retention of factory workers becomes a problem for companies in China, wages and benefits are increasing. But employers still face a labor shortage -- and their potential responses to it may have big implications for China and the rest of the world.
By Peter Cappelli the George W. Taylor Professor of Management and director of the Center for Human Resources at The Wharton School.
Read entire article

This fascinating article reiterates some of the themes I have blogged about concerning the global economy. The free market for wages and labor has finally arrived in China. Coming back from Spring Festival, workers are delaying their return to shop around among factories for the highest salary and best perks.

Foxconn, Apple's i-everything manufacturer, has announced wage increases that bring the Chinese factory worker on par with their counterparts in Mexico. This is coming faster than I expected in terms of a rising tide raising all boats (countries) closer to wage parity. And this will eventually budge the USA off the salary sandbar where wages have been moored for more than a decade of steady declines.

Cappelli expresses hope that this turn of events will help usher in modern management practices into China such as employee retention. Wow! I never thought that I would mention that and China in the same sentence.  This all bodes well for long term technology manufacturing coming back to the USA with the rising wages and costs of fuel driving that return. Steve Jobs was wrong on that one.

On the other hand, there is a glut of new college grads without employment opportunities as they lack experience and  training. They might be potential converts over to factory jobs according to Cappelli. However the increasing number of college grads in China will apply more competitive pressure to that same demographic sector here in the USA.

Once again, this is another action call to new grads in the USA to gain internship experience, add to their portfolio of marketable skills, learn languages and build a career sustainable network to launch them well.

Companies in the USA, especially the big dogs, the global multinationals need to develop immediate contingency plans  to secure ongoing stable cost of goods produced including labor costs. Short-term Vietnam, other Asian nations, or Latin America will provide those options. However, long-term might look like North Dakota next to that tar sands oil pipeline.

Fuel and supply chain costs to deliver to markets and cost of labor will be the deal makers or breakers in the next 5 years.



 

I have been working with top executives worldwide as well as in Silicon Valley for a number of years now. They are primarily employees of the big multinational European and American companies. Some are Americans, most are not, and many were educated in the USA at a top business school. The vast majority of them are not company "lifers" in that they haven't been with the same company for years, but have job hopped from company to company and country to country.

A Silicon Valley executive called me the other day thinking he needed to make a job move. His company (a top Fortune 500 software provider) was insisting that he take a promotion and 4 year transfer with his family to China. With a Chinese wife and his two small children becoming bi-lingual, this would have been a good experience for the family. He is in finance and the role would have been at the country level running all operations. It was a plum assignment. With Asian experience, he would be able to attract the best global opportunities from other corporations after this assignments.  It took much refection and research before he convinced himself to take the opportunity and see it as such.

The World Economic Forum ended on a dark worried note about the future of the worldwide workforce. The Davos gathering didn't doubt the numbers or projections. It is the means to the end that gave them consternation.

According to Vikram Pandit, CEO of the global bank, Citigroup Inc., "The world needs 400 million new jobs between now and the end of the decade, not counting the 200 million needed just to get back to full employment, so "that should be our number one priority".

It is not a simple scenario to just materialize 600 million jobs in 8 years. It is a real and dire problem with the nothing less than the world economy at stake. The financial leaders and heads of corporations spent time finger pointing across national boundaries, but they came away without a tangible solution how to grow worldwide GDP and therefore jobs. 

That there is no concerted and coordinated global response to a looming work crisis may indicate a fundamental problem with how our worldwide economic system functions with implications that impact all class and economic levels.


We Aren't Entitled to Work?

Is there such a thing as a right to work in a free market, capitalistic, global economic system? Are we as a population in the USA entitled to earn a living if we are sound of mind, able bodied and skilled? It was easy to ignore this issue when unemployment numbers were composed of the poor, uneducated and unskilled. However since 1980, every recession has generated unemployment creep upwards from manufacturing, to white collar, to now the executive suite.

This has resulted in a substantial ongoing dislocation of the socioeconomic structure of the US population . Today the 12+ million "officially" out of work is about the size of Illinois and that fails to account for the underemployed and those not looking. At the same time, the employment agency, Manpower, reports that 75% of its revenues are now from outside the USA.  In America, we know where the jobs have gone and continue to go-- elsewhere.

But that begs the question as there still won't be enough work to go around worldwide with an emerging, educated, skilled, global middle class. Are we entitled to earn a working living at the expense of another somewhere in the world? Doesn't everyone deserve the opportunity to make a contribution and be paid for doing it?

The essence of work is contribution. You do a day's labor and are paid a living wage.  But what if there is not enough work to go around anymore? Does that mean that those that want to work and can't find it are facing life as an underclass of people who are going without the basic necessities of survival, and are deprived of being contributing members of society?

Will work, especially highly skilled, intellectual work, become an entitlement or privilege? Wherever you are in the world, you got your job because of a set of advantages. Call it luck, fate, geography, position, status, connections, or price-point. The others who missed out on the opportunity didn't quite have your unique set of advantages but they were just as smart, talented, hard-working, earnest and yet unemployed.

_One of the largest placement companies in the world with 4000 offices worldwide was explaining their stock price. The key thing they said that interested me is that 85% of their business is not in the USA. They have growing markets in Asia especially.

They explained that given a significant portion of that 85% is in Europe is the reason why their earnings are down but they touted that growing emerging markets in Latin America and Asia.

If the USA's marqee employment firm is mostly offshore what does that portend for future hiring in the USA and should American job seekers who are of a mindset to reinvent themselves relocate globally to greener pastures?

If you are vital at any age, willing to blaze a new trail and blend well into different cultures including languages then seeking out opportunities globally just might be a good idea.

This headline would normally be an announcement of a planned military offensive rather than economic initiative. But it is all the same now isn't it? Any professional not paying attention to US based companies moving offshore in search of new markets will lose out on opportunities to pursue. These companies do not just hire Chinese nationals to expand their demographics and penetrate into new markets.


KFC, Pizza Hut push deeper into China
CAROLYNNE WHEELER BEIJING— From Wednesday's Globe and Mail Published Tuesday, May. 10, 2011 7:10PM EDT Last updated Wednesday, May. 11, 2011 5:20AM EDT


Yum Brands adds to fast-food restaurant stable with popular hot-pot chain, Little Sheep The Colonel's secret recipe in China has more to do with egg tarts and breakfast fritters than how he spices his chicken.

The KFC menu in China is heavily adapted to local tastes - think rice dishes and hot soy milk alongside the classic fried chicken and hot wings. The variety of offerings - along with a ubiquitous market presence - has helped the chain take off in China.

Now Yum Brands Inc., YUM-N KFC's parent company, is trying to fend off competition from domestic rivals and foreign competitors like McDonald's Corp. MCD-N by buying up a popular hot-pot chain, Little Sheep. Their preliminary offer for the Inner Mongolia-headquartered chain is still subject to regulatory approval, but if successful would add nearly 500 more restaurants to their China fold, which now includes more than 3,800 KFC and Pizza Hut locations.

The move shows the importance of the Chinese market for fast-food chains that are struggling at home. Yum Brands is the largest fast-food operator in China and its business here played a crucial role in its first-quarter earnings this year. Worldwide operating profit was up 5 per cent, thanks largely to 18-per-cent growth in China, even as profit dropped 13 per cent in the United States.

For the rest of the story in Canada's Globe and Mail click here.